What follows is a little exchange I recently had with American Federation of Teachers President and lawyer Randi Weingarten. Take a moment and post your thoughts:

Randi,

I have spent a good portion of every week over the last four years dealing with teachers who have been summarily removed from their teaching jobs based on clearly fabricated charges without any due process and without any intervention of UTLA, AFT, or CTA.

This phenomenon is going on all over the country and could not take place if consolidated legal actions was taken, since these teachers have been removed without any "verified" evidence or testimony under penalty of perjury as is required by many applicable laws that are being completely ignored.

How many of these unjustly targeted teachers and others have the ability to hire an attorney to defend themselves after losing their salaries and benefits?

Clearly, none of this could go on without the tacit complicity or blatant incompetence of the unions- you choose which. I recently heard you speak in Los Angeles, where you aptly described what is going on in very clear terms. What you failed to mention is your union's taking foundation money from public education privatizers like Broad, Gates, and Walton, which seems to have accomplished the purpose of insuring no sustained and unified union action against these clearly illegal actions taken against teachers in bad faith. If one even bothered to take even a cursory look at the clearly fabricated and suspiciously identical charges designed to get rid of almost exclusively high senior more expensive teachers at the top of the salary and benefits scales for Teach For America types, the clarity of this corruption would jump out at you. So why hasn't it? Clearly, corrupt districts like LAUSD around the country do very little to hide what they are doing to get rid of more expensive teachers on trumped up charges. And with unions like AFT, CTA, and UTLA, it doesn't seem they have to.

Sleep well and hope G-d doesn't judge your clear complicity in this war against teachers,

Lenny

(Randi answers)

Lenny-

Where is the complicity- we -every UTLA administration- has fought against the teacher jails; and we thank you for doing so as well.

Frankly, I never sleep at night, and will not sleep well until public schools are well funded and respected and that kids get the supports they need and educators the respect they deserve.

And as to Walmart, just curious how that is in your litany as we have consistently criticized them as we have Broad since 2007, and I think we are the only entity that has ever told Gates we will not apply for further [emphasis added] grants.

Randi-

(Lenny answers Randi)

If what we do and what we say can continue to be ignored with impunity, the school districts around this country will continue to bring collusive lawsuits with the forces of privatization designed to completely destroy unions and collective bargaining. UTLA's Collective Bargaining Agreement with LAUSD in Article V gives UTLA the ability to bring one consolidated lawsuit on behalf of all same or similarly targeted teachers. And yet, UTLA continues to allow the war against its rank and file to continue unabated, because it fails to defend predominantly top of the salary scale teachers- who continue to be targeted on bogus charges (93% of those who were in the rubber room), because LAUSD saves approximately $60,000 in combined salary and benefits when it gets rid of a top of the salary scale teacher for a $35,000 a year Teach For America type on an emergency credential. This is going on all over the country and yet UTLA, AFT, and CTA do nothing and can't seem to figure this out and take appropriate legal action?

There are fundamental denials of due process of law, but few teachers on their own- now without salary and benefits- can afford to lawyer up without the help of their union, which they had paid dues to for years, but which now somehow is lost when it comes to taking any action. They just without challenge walk the teacher through the dismissal process adopting all the bogus charges that continue to be fabricated by the districts as if they were true- even though they are not "verified" as required by law. This isn't sophisticated law, it's basic first year law school- don't you remember this?

As a lawyer, you know this type of irreparable and continuing damage that is difficult if not impossible to financially calculate is precisely what the laws of equity where designed to avoid and give remedies for. And yet their is no timely action brought that joins all the cases of systematically targeted teachers on bogus charges for clearly financial motives. On the outside chance that this might finally inspire you, AFT and the other unions to take appropriate action, let me suggest you might start with a Brandeis brief approach: Look at how many teachers were targeted for removal before LAUSD's chief attorney Holmquist wrote his little budget report in 2006 (2006 Retiree Health Actuarial info.pdf). Just a coincidence that the numbers go through the roof after this report?

In the Reed and subsequent Vergara cases unions did absolutely nothing to join in the cases to point out that the loss of as much of 65% of young inner city faculties made up of novice teachers had more to do with the unwillingness of generally older tenured teachers with seniority to go to schools where there was no administrative support for sufficient order to allow these seasoned veterans to do their work with a student body that had been socially promoted for years far beyond their ability to do grade-level work. No wonder these campuses are in chaos- no student wants to be humiliated like this by being asked in front of his peers to do things he was never taught before being socially promoted.

Given the option of having their brains beat out in an inner city school filled with socially promoted students without the foundational skills to do the grade level work they were being asked to do or using their teacher seniority to get as far away from these schools as possible, these teachers made the rational choice to go elsewhere. But the novice teachers that stayed and ultimately lost their jobs due to low seniority were not better, they were just more willing to fix grades and cheat on assessment exams under pressure from school administrators whose own job success is now defined by how many teachers at the top of the salary scale or about to vest in lifetime health or disabled they can get rid of on trumped up charges. But the unions can't figure this out?

So LAUSD now is supposed to have a rise in graduation rates to 77%, but Los Angeles City College (LACC) finds that 70% of its incoming students are doing remedial and not college level work. And most ultimately drop out out of frustration without ever completing their work, because they were pushed through K-12 without adequate skills and no accountability. And the unions can do nothing about this?

Let me know if you would actually like to do something, since if this is allowed to continue it will clearly threaten the very future of this country as anything that even remotely resembles a constitutional democracy.

Tikun olam (Heal the earth)? Is that just Jewish rhetoric to be parroted annually with never any measurable improvement of the human condition?

Shana tovah (Happy New Year) Randi. We can clearly do better. And the tragedy is that it would be much easier and less expensive to do so.

Lenny

If you or someone you know has been targeted and are in the process of being dismissed and need legal defense, get in touch:

Lenny@perdaily.com

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